2 comments:

Good question. Hopefully other readers who've been at this métier longer than I will weigh in with their thoughts. Is there something cyclical about cuts to heritage funding in Canada, or would a better metaphor be that of the downward spiral?

I'd love to read a good diachronic study of heritage funding in this country, something that tracks federal and provincial spending in the sector in absolute and proportional terms. How bountiful, really, were the bountiful 1960s and 1970s? How do the dramatic deficit-cutting measures of the Chrétien years compare to the reductions of these Harper days? Is what we're seeing merely more of the same, or is it something fundamentally different?

Critics have written at length about the dubious ideological foundations of this latest round of cuts. But to explore another line of reasoning, I wonder if much of what we're seeing now is not at least in part the effect of having placed executives who lack training and experience as historians, archeologists, ethnologists, archivists or librarians at the helm of national institutions. Folks such as Daniel Caron at LAC, Alan Latourelle at Parks Canada, or Mark O'Neil at the soon-to-be Canadian Museum of History rose through the ranks of the civil service via corporate services, operations and policy, strategic planning, etc. The same is true of the slew of vice-presidents who assist them. These professional bureaucrats may have a sincere love of heritage and hold strong ideas about it, but might they not be more poorly equipped than an earlier generation of executives -- who actually had a sense of what it is to research and write history -- to target the funding cuts (or the funding windfall, in the case of the Museum) in a way that best serves their users?